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Editors' notes

Editors' Note: This version of the Ralph Barton Perry's "Preface"
to the collection of James's essays is taken from the 1996 republication of the original
by the University of Nebraska Press. The page numbers were altered from the original
publication to accomodate an introductory essay by Ellen Kappy Suckiel.

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Essays in Radical Empiricism

Editor's Preface

THE present volume is an attempt to carry out a plan which William James is known to
have formed several years before his death. In 1907 he collected reprints in an envelope
which he inscribed with the title 'Essays in Radical Empiricism'; and he also had
duplicate sets of these reprints bound, under the same title, and deposited for the use of
students in the general Harvard Library, and in the Philosophical Library in Emerson Hall.

Two years later Professor James published The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic
Universe, and inserted in these volumes several of the articles which he had intended
to use in the ' Essays in Radical Empiricism.' Whether he would nevertheless have carried
out his original plan, had he lived, cannot be certainly known. Several facts, however,
stand out very clearly. In the first place, the articles included in the original plan but
omitted from his later volumes are indispensable to the understanding

(xvi) of his other writings. To these articles he repeatedly alludes. Thus, in The
Meaning of Truth (p. 127), he says: "This statement is probably excessively
obscure to any one who has not read my two articles 'Does Consciousness Exist ?' and 'A
World of Pure Experience. ' " Other allusions have been indicated in the present
text. In the second place, the articles originally brought together as 'Essays in Radical
Empiricism' form a connected whole. Not only were most of them written consecutively
within a period of two years, but they contain numerous cross-references. In the third
place, Professor James regarded 'radical empiricism' as an independent doctrine.
This he asserted expressly: "Let me say that there is no logical connexion between
pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as 'radical
empiricism.' The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a
pragmatist." (Pragmatism, 1907, Preface, p. ix.) Finally, Professor James
came toward the end of his life to regard 'radical empiricism' as more

(xvii) fundamental and more important than 'pragmatism.' In the Preface to The
Meaning of Truth (1909), the author gives the following explanation of his desire to
continue, and if possible conclude, the controversy over pragmatism: " I am
interested in another doctrine in philosophy to which I give the name of radical
empiricism, and it seems to me that the establishment of the pragmatist theory of truth is
a step of first-rate importance in making radical empiricism prevail " (p. xii).

In preparing the present volume, the editor has therefore been governed by two motives. On
the one hand, he has sought to preserve and make accessible certain important articles not
to be found in Professor James's other books. This is true of Essays 1, II IV, V, VIII,
IX, x, Xi, and XII. On the other hand, he has sought to bring together in one volume a set
of essays treating systematically of one independent, coherent, and fundamental doctrine.
To this end it has seemed best to include three essays (III VI, and VII), which, although
included in the original plan, were afterwards reprinted else-

(xviii)-where; and one essay, XII, not included in the original plan. Essays III, VI,
and VII are indispensable to the consecutiveness of the series, and are so interwoven with
the rest that it is necessary that the student should have them at hand for ready
consultation. Essay XII throws an important light on the author's general 'empiricism,'
and forms an important link between 'radical empiricism' and the author's other doctrines.

In short, the present volume is designed not as a collection but rather as a treatise. It
is intended that another volume shall be issued which shall contain papers having
biographical or historical importance which have not yet been reprinted in book form. The
present volume is intended not only for students of Professor James's philosophy, but for
students of metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. It sets forth systematically and
within brief compass the doctrine of 'radical empiricism.'

A word more may be in order concerning the general meaning of this doctrine. In the
Preface to the Will to Believe (1898), Professor

(xix) James gives the name "radical empiricism" to his "
philosophic attitude," and adds the following explanation: "I say 'empiricism,'
because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact
as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say
'radical,' because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, unlike
so much of the halfway empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or
agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something
with which all experience has got to square " (pp. vii-viii). An 'empiricism' of this
description is a "philosophic attitude" or temper of mind rather than a
doctrine, and characterizes all of Professor James's writings. It is set forth in Essay
XII of the present volume.

In a narrower sense, 'empiricism' is the method of resorting to particular experiences
for the solution of philosophical problems. Rationalists are the men of principles,
empiricists the men of facts. (Some Problems of Philosophy,

(xx)p. 35; cf. also, ibid., p. 44; and Pragmatism, pp. 9,
51.) Or, "since principles are universals, and facts are particulars, perhaps the
best way of characterizing the two tendencies is to say that rationalist thinking proceeds
most willingly by going from wholes to parts, while empiricist thinking proceeds by going
from parts to wholes." (Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 35; cf. also ibid.,
p. 98; and A Pluralistic Universe, p. 7.) Again, empiricism "remands us
to sensation." (Op. cit., P. 264.) The "empiricist view" insists that,
"as reality is created temporally day by day, concepts . . . can never fitly
supersede perception.... The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual
experience." (Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 100, 97.) Empiricism in this
sense is as yet characteristic of Professor James's philosophy as a whole. It is
not the distinctive and independent doctrine set forth in the present book.

Theonly summary of 'radical empiricism I in this last and narrowest sense
appears in the Preface to The Meaning of Truth (pp. xii-xiii);

(xxi) and it must be reprinted here as the key to the text that follows. [1]

" Radical empiricism consists (1) first of a postulate, (2) next of a statement of
fact, (3) and finally of a generalized conclusion."

(1) "The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among
philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. (Things of an
unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for
philosophic debate.) " This is "the principle of pure experience" as
"a methodical postulate." (Cf. below, pp. 159, 241.) This postulate
corresponds to the notion which the author repeatedly attributes to Shadworth Hodgson, the
notion "that realities are only what they are 'known as."' (Pragmatism, p. 50;
Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 443; The Meaning of Truth, pp. 43, 118.)
In this sense 'radical empiricism' and pragmatism are closely allied. Indeed, if
pragmatism be defined as the assertion that "the meaning of any proposition can
always be brought down to some

(xxii) particular consequence in our future practical experience, . . . the point lying
in the fact that the experience must be particular rather than in the fact that it must be
active " (Meaning of Truth, p. 9.10); then pragmatism and the above
postulate come to the same thing. The present book, however, consists not so much in the
assertion of this postulate as in the use of it. And the method is successful in
special applications by virtue of a certain "statement of fact" concerning
relations.

(2) "The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as
well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither
more so nor less so, than the things themselves." (Cf. also A Pluralistic
Universe, p. 280; The Will to Believe, p. 278.) This is the central doctrine of the
present book. It distinguishes 'radical empiricism' from the "ordinary
empiricism" of Hume, J. S. Mill, etc., with which it is otherwise allied. (Cf. below,
pp. 42-44.) It provides an empirical and relational version of 'activity,'

(xxiii) and so distinguishes the author's voluntarism from a view with which it is
easily confused -- the view which upholds a pure or transcendent activity. (Cf. below,
Essay VI.) It makes it possible to escape the vicious disjunctions that have thus far
baffled philosophy: such disjunctions as those between consciousness and physical nature,
between thought and its object, between one mind and another, and between one 'thing' and
another. These disjunctions need not be 'overcome' by calling in any " extraneous
trans-empirical connective support" (Meaning of Truth, Preface, p. xiii);
they may now be avoided by regarding the dualities in question as only differences
of empirical relationship among common empirical terms. The pragmatistic account of
'meaning' and 'truth,' shows only how a vicious disjunction between 'idea' and 'object'
may thus be avoided. The present volume not only presents pragmatism in this light; but
adds similar accounts of the other dualities mentioned above.

Thus while pragmatism and radical empiri-

(xxiv)-cism. do not differ essentially when regarded as methods, they are
independent when regarded as doctrines. For it would be possible to hold the pragmatistic
theory of 'meaning' and 'truth,' without basing it on any fundamental theory of relations,
and without extending such a theory of relations to residual philosophical problems;
without, in short, holding either to the above 'statement of fact,' or to the following
'generalized conclusion.'

(3) "The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold
together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The
directly apprehended universe needs., in short, no extraneous transempirical connective
support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure." When
thus generalized, 'radical empiricism' is not only a theory of knowledge comprising
pragmatism as a special chapter, but a metaphysic as well. It excludes " the
hypothesis of trans-empirical reality " (Cf. below, p. 195). It is the author's most
rigorous statement of his theory that reality is an "ex-

(xxv)-perience-continuum." (Meaning of Truth, p. 152; A Pluralistic
Universe, Lect. v, vii.) It is that positive and constructive 'empiricism' of which
Professor James said: "Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as
hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion,
and I believe that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be ready to
begin." (Op. cit., p. 314; cf. ibid., Lect. viii, passim; and
The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 515-527.)

The editor desires to acknowledge his obligations to the periodicals from which these
essays have been reprinted, and to the many friends of Professor James who have rendered
valuable advice and assistance in the preparation of the present volume.

Notes

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